Dr Livingstone Memorial Museum, Ujiji

One site, three names on your itinerary

Itineraries in this part of Tanzania routinely list the Ujiji historical site, the Livingstone memorial and the Dr Livingstone museum as separate stops. They are one place.

Tanzania National Parks, which holds it as an antiquity, calls it the Dr David Livingstone Memorial Museum. Its own brochure for the site lists the memorial monument of Livingstone and Stanley, a guided visit of historic Ujiji town and the museum’s two display halls as the attractions of that one site, under one management, on one ticket. Elsewhere TANAPA refers to the whole thing simply as the Dr Livingstone historical site near Ujiji. Budgeting three stops means budgeting the same hour three times.

Where it is

TANAPA places the museum on the western side of Kigoma urban area, in Kigoma South division, Kitongoni Ward, on Mnazi Mmoja Street. It gives the distance as about seven kilometres from Kigoma main train station, near the small port at Ujiji, and 700 metres from the Lake Tanganyika shore.

Tanzania’s own submission to UNESCO’s tentative list puts Ujiji about five kilometres from the Kigoma railway station. The two figures are measuring slightly different things — a town and a building inside it — and both are official. Either way it is a short ride: TANAPA’s own directions are a taxi, motorcycle or bajaj from the bus terminal, the railway station or the airport.

The monument and the mango tree

TANAPA’s account of the monument is worth having in full, because it is more specific than the anecdote it is usually reduced to. The site began with a mango tree, under which Livingstone and his companions Chuma and Susi established a temporary base, and under which Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley met for the first time in 1871. By the 1920s the historic tree had weakened, the British administration decided to cut it down, and the monument was officially built in 1927.

The brochure also gives a date for the origin of the memorial idea that does not fit the period it describes, and it is not repeated here.

Inside, and around

The museum holds historic and cultural collections supporting the memorial evidence, and a photographic display which TANAPA describes as dominating the contents — well-kept historic photographs of the slave trade period alongside the Livingstone panorama. Its national record describes the slave-trade exhibition as the substance of the place, using artefacts, documents and multimedia, with material on resistance and abolition, and a second strand on the wider history of east and central Africa.

The guided visit of Ujiji town, which TANAPA counts as part of the site, takes in the central ivory and slave trade route, a German-era building at Kaluta Primary School, and the memorial monument itself. See the slave trade history tours guide and the museum tours guide.

Practical

TANAPA gives the opening hours as 08:00 to 17:30 Monday to Friday, and 08:00 to 17:00 on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays. Payment is electronic only — mobile or card — so arrive able to pay that way. Inside, the museum asks for quiet, bans phone calls, and does not allow visitors to touch the artwork or the collections. TANAPA describes the main activity as a short guided tour carrying a great deal of historical information, which is a fair warning: the value here is the guiding, not the object count.

Common questions